Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, op. 17, is considered one of her greatest masterpieces and her most ambitious, large-scale work since the Piano Concerto she wrote as a teenager.
program notes
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Robust chords from piano, violin and cello lift the curtain on Dvořák’s Piano Trio in G minor, a dramatic introduction before first the piano, then the violin give us the movement’s winding first theme. The dramatic chords return as the movement intensifies.
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Two ghosts pass each other in a deserted park in Paul Verlaine’s melancholy poem ‘Colloque sentimental’ (Sentimental Conversation). One repeatedly prompts the other to remember their past love, but the second ghost is unable – or unwilling – to remember and speaks only of despair.
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French composer Claude Debussy was just beginning to find his musical voice when he penned the six settings of poems by Paul Verlaine that would come to be the Ariettes oubliées or ‘Forgotten Songs’.
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Lush, undulating piano introduces the main theme of Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 13, before the violin begins its climbing melody over the top. Read more.
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Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor was the French composer’s final completed composition. Debussy performed the sonata himself at the premiere, with Gaston Poulet on violin, in his final public performance in Paris on May 5, 1917.